The documentary is called "INDIA ON THE MOVE" for good reason. “The elephant is thundering,” says Vineet Agarwal whose family owns India’s largest freight company – the one growing at 25 per cent a year.And from his leather armchair, in the living room of his private jet, an Airbus A319 that would normally carry 130 passengers, billionaire Vijay Mallya leans forward, chuckles and declares that: “before, America and Europe held center stage. I guess center stage is going to move east.”
Such is the confidence that now abounds in an economy that boasts a middle-class of 300 million, and more young people than anywhere else on earth — 500 million under 25. See the call center come of age, and Arjun and Sunita’s good life unfold. They are American-trained doctors, married with two kids, running two businesses and clearing email in the car on the way to work. In one business they do radiology over the Internet: a room full of Indian radiologists analyze cat-scans and x-rays of patients sitting in emergency rooms in America. They turn the results round in half an hour.
“This is almost space age medicine,” says Arjun, a Yale graduate.
But “India on the Move” also reveals that India still has a long way to go. It is all “space age” and “consumer age” in the cities, but medieval in the countryside, where farmers live in dire debt, and an alarming number commit suicide.Corruption is improving, but remains endemic; public education is woeful; and crucially, despite all progress, there remains a desperate need for jobs. The Indian growth of recent times has largely been driven by the service sector and software, but the documentary makes clear that India will have to make widgets and not just digits, if it wants to ever provide enough jobs.
"INDIA ON THE MOVE" captures all this through the lives of people at a moment in history when this ancient civilization has decided to take on the future — and transform the world.
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